With this World Eaters captain’s furious roar, the entire Blood Glory Gang sprang into motion.
As the saying goes, the gangs of the under-hive are tentacles extending down from the upper-hive, and these lunatics, blessed by the power of Chaos, were by no means weak in battle.
So before long a sprawling war erupted in the under-hive, and it began to spread upward at a rapid pace.
At the same time, Heydrich—the very instigator of it all—rode the elevator back up to the spire-top.
He had, after all, come down on a perfectly legitimate mission.
And having just hoodwinked an Alpharius, he didn’t intend to use that particular alias again for the time being.
Heydrich’s strength still wasn’t enough; he had no plans to get tangled up in the affairs of the Astartes too soon.
As everyone knew, this world ran on a bizarre matchmaking mechanism—from the gene-Primarchs at the top all the way down to those god-chosen commissars.
They would all, just as they were starting out, go through a stretch of plot straight out of a wish-fulfillment novel, and then one day they’d run into the enemy of their lifetime.
Heydrich had no idea whether he himself would be drawn into this strange matchmaking mechanism, so the method he adopted could be summed up in a single phrase: lie low first.
What was more, the Great Rift had not yet torn open, and Guilliman had not yet awoken.
The whole Imperium was mired in its darkest, most despairing thousand years.
With his puny little arms and legs, he’d best not go acting recklessly.
The people of House Miltel pursued sensory stimulation, and seemed to be constantly trying out new thrills.
The people of the Blood Glory Gang had a morbid obsession with skulls—it seemed a touch unhinged.
Soon afterward, Heydrich quickly wrote up the incident he’d encountered into a report and submitted it to his superior.
As an enforcer for a sector family, he wasn’t supposed to know anything about Chaos.
So he simply reported the information he’d seen as it was.
Chaos corruption may be terrifying, but it wasn’t quite that terrifying—much of the time, most of the noble houses had some understanding of it.
So this sort of content fell within the bounds of what someone in his ‘identity’ could report without triggering any special investigation.
As for the matter of him slipping down to the under-hive and butchering a World Eaters—Heydrich wasn’t crazy enough to breathe a word of it.
After all, a mortal taking down a World Eaters, famous for their combat prowess—no matter how you looked at it, it seemed too outrageous.
One had to understand that even an ordinary Space Marine facing a World Eaters might not come away unscathed.
For someone like him to do it was simply too over-the-top.
“Good thing it was just an ordinary World Eaters.
After all, whose household gets into fights every day where the baseline is a Primarch, with no upper limit?”
Having arranged everything properly, Heydrich leisurely poured himself a cup of tea.
While he was at it, he lit a stick of incense at the shrine in his room that held a statue of the Emperor.
That shrine had been left behind by the previous tenant, cast from cheap plasteel, the Emperor’s contours long since worn blurry by daily wiping, leaving only a pair of hollow eye sockets gazing indifferently upon every passing occupant of the room.
Heydrich, of course, did not worship the Emperor—much less believe in Him.
His only thought regarding this dried-up corpse atop the golden toilet was to keep a respectful distance.
Even if, far enough down the Path in the future, he were one day forced to cross paths with this Master of Mankind, he intended to carve the words ‘tread carefully’ across his own forehead.
But in the Imperium of Man, faith in the Emperor was the one and only consensus, especially in the spire-top.
If a room had no shrine to the Emperor on display, it would draw unnecessary attention.
Acting on the principle of when-in-Rome and speaking to people in their own tongue while speaking to ghosts in theirs, Heydrich figured that since he was already here anyway, lighting a stick of incense did no harm—he might as well count it as paying the property fee.
The main thing was that in the Imperium of Man, the one and only consensus was faith in the Emperor.
Especially once you reached the upper-hive, if your room had no shrine to the Emperor on display, that was a very dangerous thing.
So Heydrich likewise acted on the principle of when in Rome, speaking to people in their own tongue and to ghosts in theirs.
In very standard Chinese terms, it amounted to: since I’m already here, lighting a stick of incense can’t do any harm.
“Next, let’s see how the storm I’ve stirred up will develop—will everything turn out for the better, or for the worse?”
Leisurely pouring himself a cup of tea, then acting on the principle of the-more-chaos-the-better, Heydrich chose to sit back and wait for things to unfold.
If it could draw the attention of the Inquisition, all the better—he could wipe them all out together while he was at it.
As for himself, he scarcely needed to worry.
Although the Inquisition were all a great pack of lunatics—
No matter how deranged they got, they wouldn’t go so far as to drop an Exterminatus order on the governor planet of a sector.
Besides, he didn’t have just the one alias; if worst came to worst, he’d simply slip away when the heat was on.
After all, with his blank state in the Warp, those so-called prophecy-type psykers couldn’t lock onto him at all.
And what was more, he had the protection of the Path of Enigmata; finding him through any special method was an impossibility.
“By the way, once the situation settles down, I’ll see if I can make a trip to the under-hive and harvest a few more Necron Warriors.
As for that Alpharius—let’s hope this little secret hasn’t made him blow his top.”
There was nothing Heydrich could do about it.
In any case, he probably wouldn’t be using that alias again, so there was no need to worry about any lingering aftereffects.
……
Meanwhile, on the other side, just as Heydrich had quieted down for the moment, Hive City Kuent was anything but peaceful.
With the Chaos artifact he’d been searching for destroyed by someone, and a full five of his brothers lost, the World Eaters squad leader erupted in terrifying fury—but fury was fury.
For now he still managed, barely, to stay calm, and didn’t go charging straight up to the upper-hive to start hacking people down.
Astartes may be terrifyingly strong, but he was no Kharn, Khorne’s god-chosen champion.
Nor was he one of those named and renowned World Eaters.
To pit his lone strength against an entire hive city—better to forget about that.
So since he couldn’t take on the entire hive city head-on, he’d have to use his head a little.
After all, no large-scale sacrifice had been carried out across the planet yet, so those Bloodletters and Bloodthirsters and the like couldn’t be summoned out.
So given all that, he would have to make use of these under-hive dregs to launch a rebellion against the planetary government.
At the same time, the faces of House Miltel up in the upper-hive looked none too pleased, because their enterprises had taken a heavy hit.
One had to understand that as a small-to-mid-sized noble house on this planet, their enterprises were all interlinked, one ring after another.
So the upheaval in the under-hive would be transmitted upward layer by layer.
And what was even more frightening was that the planetary government had suddenly shifted its attitude toward their house.
The implication was obvious: they were to put in the effort to root out and suppress the under-hive gangs.
After all, no matter how chaotic the under-hive got, it was still territory controlled by the planetary government.
They could watch a pack of under-hive dregs run wild and frenzied, but they absolutely could not watch a gang with the potential to unify the under-hive emerge.
What was more, the planetary governor had also received some kind of secret report, and seemed to have discovered something.
So at a time like this, even House Miltel had no choice but to muster their private soldiers and manpower and march toward the under-hive.
At the same time, within the black tower of the Inquisition in Hive City Kuent, a tall Astartes walked inside.
It was none other than the Alpharius whom Heydrich had played for a fool earlier—and judging by his paint scheme, he was unmistakably a Black Shield, one of the members of the Inquisition’s special unit, the Deathwatch.
“You’re saying you’ve discovered an elder of your Legion, and that he seems to be a Terran-born being who took part in the Unification Wars?”
At this moment, the Inquisitor of Hive City Kuent furrowed his brow slightly upon hearing this news.